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Palette: how to get a pleasant megrim.

I’m an artist. Not a designer. I enjoy colors, their born, their death and their story, but I’m not a scientist. I do not like to calibrate every single number and letter in RGB or html color’s code.

But as I said before, choices are the bases of what you wanna do and color measurements are the begin of that choices. I had to study a bit due my lack of experience in pixel art, and I found out a HIDDEN WORLD about palette in low resolution games.

I.e. NES 8bit had technically 64 colors but its sprites had to be depicted in 3 colors only (plus one trasparent), and only 24 could be used at the same time on screen. On SNES we could have 15 colors for every sprite and 256 on screen out of 32,768 colors.*

But, again: I’m not a scientist. In Wizard’s Duel we have no such technical limitation as in ’89. Today we have 16,8 billions color in 32 bit with no limits to colors on screen… So why is a palette so important? Because it’s like your wardrobe: it talks about you, of your mood and your character: you would not have billions of clothes and let the others thinking your a clown! And so do we. At my analysis great games such as Sword & Sworcery or Hyper Light Drifter comunicate their essence with a minimal four-combo colors:

S&S: cyan, emmerald, purple and ocre (all grayish and destaurated)

HLD: orange, cyan, magenta, dark turquoise

And this is the path I will walk… My next post will show you some results.

* This because there were only 2 bits per pixel on the NES and 4 bits per pixel on the SNES, making it so that each sprite could only have 3(+trasparency) colors on NES and 15(+transparency) on the SNES.

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Wizards of Unica is completely independently developed, by two nice guys who joined together to make their dream of making games come true. Wizards of Unica will be free-to-play: if you like our work, help us to create a bigger, better, harder game!